cor·pus /'kôrpəs/
n. pl. cor·po·ra (-pr-)
1. A large collection of writings of a specific kind or on a specific subject.
2. A collection of writings or recorded remarks used for linguistic analysis.
3. The main part of a bodily structure or organ.
//Reviews of art. Art and language. Art and the body.

Friday, 30 October 2015

Art Is Your Human Right: The Artistic Campaigns
of Bob and Roberta Smith

William Morris Gallery

16 October 2015 - 31 January 2016

Bob and Roberta Smith’s art has
long been of a political nature. In 2013, he hosted an Art Party conference in
Scarborough, seeking to advocate the benefits of the arts. In the UK’s recent general
election, he stood against Michael Gove. His text-based works, often referred
to as “slogan art”, comprise placards and banners, letters to MPs (in large, bright
lettering on boards rescued from skips) and golem-like structures. With
London’s mayoral elections approaching, Smith is once again pounding his drum.
This time, he is not taking the frontline, but sees his role as, first, encouraging
others to become involved and, second, heckling politicians to include the arts
in their manifestos.

Thursday, 29 October 2015

The Sufi
master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan once said: ‘To bring the sublime into the
mundane is the greatest challenge there is’. The sublime, ideas of which are
generally dated back to the first century AD, when the Greek critic Longinus
wrote an aesthetic treatise on the subject,1 is largely associated
with greatness, awe and something exceeding human understanding or
representation. Kant suggests it has the power to transform and uplift, to make
human reason transcend sensibility, by confronting it with something at first
seemingly incomprehensible.2 His focus – as well as that of his
predecessor Edmund Burke3 – is upon nature and the divine as sources
for the sublime experience, and this can also be seen in contemporary 18th and
19th-century artworks by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, JMW Turner and
John Martin.

Marguerite
Horner’s paintings might therefore appear to depict the polar opposite of the
sublime. Her suburban streets and highways, deserted parking lots, cars,
telegraph poles and wires, largely inspired by her experiences of small town
America, are the stuff of the everyday – mundane, quotidian, manmade. Yet, with
their grisaille palette, fluctuating between being crisply focused and blurred
to the point of obfuscation, there is something uncanny about these otherwise
easily recognisable scenes. They are familiar, yet strange – estranged. Freud delineates
the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known
of old and long familiar’,4 as ‘nothing new or alien, but something
which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated
from it only through the process of repression’.5 He drew a
distinction between the uncanny and the sublime, by imbuing the latter with
solely positive attributes, ‘rather than with the opposite feelings of
repulsion and distress’. The uncanny, on the other hand, he classed as those
things ‘which lie within the field of what is frightening’.6,7 This
is false on two counts: (i) his interpretation of the sublime is somewhat
rose-tinted, since it is often associated, in the first instance, with terror
and horror, and (ii) this very process of alienation and repression, which
Freud attributes to the uncanny, is what leads to Kant’s transcendental
encounter with the sublime.

Consider,
for example, the incident with the madeleine in Proust’s Combray. Describing the moment of tasting the known-but-unknown
delicacy, Proust writes: ‘…this new sensation having had on me the effect that
love has of filling me with a precious essence;
or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre,
contingent, mortal.’8 His description is of a form of
self-transcendence, an encounter with the sublime, triggered through an
encounter with the alienated and forgotten, the known-but-unknown, the uncanny.
In the same way, Horner’s paintings serve to trigger a memory. In their veiled
state, they seek not to represent, but to signify. They seek to fill their
viewer with an essence. This
realisation and resultant introspection then suggests that Horner’s paintings
have succeeded in meeting the Sufi master’s challenge: a seemingly mundane
image, like the simple madeleine, can contain the seed, or essence, of a memory or state, that can lead the viewer to
transcend his or her physical being and cease to feel ‘mediocre, contingent,
mortal’.

Simon
Morley, discussing the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, notes
that beauty is static, that we are charmed, seduced and captivated by it, while
the sublime transports, moves and dislocates us from our self. He references
how Arthur Schopenhauer ‘explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being,
and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very
act of confronting a fearful inner abyss’.9 It is this inner abyss
that Horner captures so strikingly in her paintings: a sense of loneliness and
emptiness, a far greater and more terrifying phenomenon than anything nature
can offer. As Derrida observes, contrary to Kant and Burke: ‘The sublime is not
in nature but only in ourselves’.10 Horner herself speaks of taking
inspiration from Jung, when he declared a similar, if reversed, observation:
‘For the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without’.11
She says: ‘In my paintings, I strive to capture the meaningful dialogue between
my internal and external realities, which are metaphorically portrayed, by
using images intuitively taken from my passing landscape’.12

To return
to Morley’s notion that the sublime transports, moves and dislocates us from
our self, we begin to understand the latent symbolism of Horner’s cars: parked
or frozen in movement, they are vehicles of transcendence, transporting the
viewer from within to without, from without to within. Her use of blurring,
reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s use of the squeegee, has dual effect. Firstly,
it suggests transience – a sense of passing by, of motion. Secondly, like the
veiling of the greyscale palette, it reduces the image to the bare minimum –
the Proustian essence. Richter,
speaking of his own use of the technique, says: ‘I blur things to make
everything equally important and equally unimportant. […] I blur things to make
all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant
information’.13 In terms of the sublime, these blurred passages
represent what Lyotard terms: ‘a
cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived andwhat can be imagined or presented’.14
They are the physical, painterly manifestation of this fissure.

Derrida,
in his essay ‘Parergon’,focuses attention not on the object of
contemplation (the work, or ‘ergon’), but on its boundary. He speaks of the
need to frame something to prevent it from becoming merely monstrous. Horner’s
paintings are full of frames within frames: the grey skies, streets, and
parking lots are bisected by bright white road markings, lamp posts, trees, and
telegraph wires. In Boxed In (2010),
the block of flats is set in a vivid red square, restricting the main frame of
reference to a fraction of the composition, with the mundane continuing all
around. Within this red frame, a myriad windows – further, smaller frames –
push up against one another. Each offers a different (albeit the same)
viewpoint, a reflection of the outer world. This segment could be seen from any
angle, upside down, it would make no difference. Pixelated imagery, like
reflections on the retina, multiple tiny photograms, just prior to being
interpreted into a coherent image by the mind. Horner speaks of a constant
dialogue between the mark and the inner eye in the process of her painting. The
same is true for the viewer as he or she interprets it. Horner is providing
just the ingredients – the flour and lemon juice of the madeleine – and asking
viewers to reconstruct their own memories – to recognise in the universe
without, their own universe within and to confront and transcend this inner
abyss. In so doing, she is bringing the sublime into the mundane.

Notes

1. Longinus, On the Sublime, available online as part
of the Project Gutenberg, EBook #17957, trans. by HL Havell, 2006,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17957/17957-h/17957-h.htm (accessed 11 October
2015)

7. See also Jessica Wren Butler, ‘What is Literature?: The sublime/uncanny
as a conceptual framework for answering the answerless, and the problematic
quest for certainty,’ essay available via academia.edu (accessed 11 October
2015)

11. Carl Jung, Collected Works of CG Jung: The First
Complete English Edition of the Works of CG Jung,vol. IV, 1953, ed. by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and
Gerhard Adler and trans. by RFC Hull(London: Routledge, 2015) p1482

Deep beneath the ground in the
heart of Shoreditch, a basement brims with hooded figures; pithy, stencilled
statements; exposed bricks; graffiti tags and corrugated steel sheets. But
these are not crude scribbles on a cellar wall; these are carefully crafted
paintings – worth a bob or two, at that – by Miranda Donovan, a City and Guilds-trained
artist, who refers to her deeply layered and textured works as “sculptural
paintings” and who, through her own self-exploration, questions and challenges
the viewer’s concept of the human condition.

The venue is the CNB Gallery –
formerly Cock and Bull – named after the infamous Damien Hirst tank containing a
Hereford cow and a cockerel, preserved in formaldehyde, and elevated above diners
in the centre of the former electricity generating station, now Mark Hix’s
Tramshed restaurant, directly above. Donovan and Hix first collaborated in
2009, when the artist was commissioned to create a bespoke mobile for his Soho
restaurant. They have continued to work together on and off ever since.

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Derek Boshier (b1937) came to
prominence as one of a generation of pop artists emerging from the Royal
College of Art in the early 70s. He left the UK soon after for Texas, initially
to teach for one semester, but ultimately remaining there for 13 years, before
moving to Los Angeles, where he now resides. Boshier has embraced a variety of
media, most recently adopting the iPad as his at-the-ready tool for capturing
images and ideas, which go on to become parts of his films and works on paper –
all of which the artist describes as “collages”.

Boshier is associated with a number
of great musicians and has produced imagery for, among others, the Clash and
David Bowie. His falling man motif used in the design for Bowie’s 1979 LP Lodger
has become iconic, as have many of his other images.

The current exhibition at Flowers
Gallery shows sketches for much of Boshier’s songbook and LP graphic design
work, as well as some of his early photographic series and spoofs of right-wing
national newspapers. Recent collages, with thick black outlines, contrast with
earlier ones, confronting consumerism and the dehumanising effect of mass
culture. A film from 1973 plays on a loop with three films from 2014, made
after he rediscovered the earlier work and decided to retry his hand at that
medium.

Rethink/Re-Entry is co-curated by
Paul Gorman, who is also the editor of a new publication of the same name,
presenting an overview of Boshier’s work, accompanied by essays by leading
academics, critics and curators, as well as a foreword by David Hockney.

Now in its eighth year, the British Art Show is the
largest and most ambitious touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK,
bringing together emerging artists worth watching with those who have been
working for three or four decades.

Over the years, the British Art
Show has captured numerous significant moments in the nation’s art history and has
promoted the careers of many who have gone on to become household names,
including Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Gilbert & George, Steve McQueen,
Chris Ofili and Damien Hirst. This year, the exhibition, curated by Anna Colin
and Lydia Yee, comprises work by 42 artists, 26 of whom have made new
commissions and many others of whom are presenting works that have never been
shown in the UK.

Studio International spoke to five
of the artists involved.

Ciara Phillips – one of last year’s Turner Prize nominees – is a
Glasgow-based Canadian artist who uses printmaking as a way of bringing about
socio-political discussions. With a curatorial focus this year on
collaboration, BAS8 has provided Phillips with an opportunity to run community
print workshops and create a publication based on the Irregular Bulletin, a
newsletter produced in the late 50s/early 60s by radical educator and artist
Corita Kent and her colleague, Sister Magdalene Mary.

Laure Prouvost, the London-based French artist who won the 2013
Turner Prize, is showcasing three of her “interruptions” – sound and light pieces
that turn on and off at intervals, humorously giving voice to a range of
objects, including a hard drive, a fan and a croissant.

Ryan Gander, who lives and works in Suffolk and London, is
displaying a range of works including sculpture, film and a wallpapered diorama,
comprising notes he makes to himself on his studio walls. His carved pieces
explore the concept of still life, like Prouvost’s, bringing together
improbable objects into imaginary dialogues.

Feed Me is the first feature-length
film work by Scottish artist Rachel
Maclean. With Maclean playing all of the characters, with wild and wacky
costumes and facemasks, the plotline veers from the saccharine to the horrific,
tearing down contemporary society and its vices along the way. Pop culture
references abound and the Disney-like effect is a facade for the Grimms’ fairytale
beneath.

Last but not least, Martino Gamper is a London-based
Italian designer who describes his artisanal approach as “conceptual and functional”.His participatory project, Post Forma,
has been commissioned by Yorkshire Festival and Hayward Touring, in partnership
with Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle and Arts Council England’s Strategic Touring
Programme. Gamper’s mixture of craft, design and art – furniture-making,
cobbling, weaving and bookbinding – fits this year’s curatorial emphasis on
materiality and the importance of objects, not just as objects, but as vehicles
for narratives.

About Me

Art writer and editor with background as an academic linguist. Assistant Editor at Art Quarterly (Art Fund) and Web Editor for AICA. Former Deputy Editor at State media and Arts Editor at DIVA magazine. Regular contributor to Studio International, Photomonitor, Elephant and the Mail on Sunday. Member of the NUJ, WiJ and AICA. NCTJ qualified.